CVE-2025-22115 — btrfs: fix block group refcount race in btrfs_create_pending_block_groups()

Affected: Linux

In the Linux kernel, the following vulnerability has been resolved:

btrfs: fix block group refcount race in btrfs_create_pending_block_groups()

Block group creation is done in two phases, which results in a slightly unintuitive property: a block group can be allocated/deallocated from after btrfs_make_block_group() adds it to the space_info with btrfs_add_bg_to_space_info(), but before creation is completely completed in btrfs_create_pending_block_groups(). As a result, it is possible for a block group to go unused and have 'btrfs_mark_bg_unused' called on it concurrently with 'btrfs_create_pending_block_groups'. This causes a number of issues, which were fixed with the block group flag 'BLOCK_GROUP_FLAG_NEW'.

However, this fix is not quite complete. Since it does not use the unused_bg_lock, it is possible for the following race to occur:

btrfs_create_pending_block_groups btrfs_mark_bg_unused if list_empty // false list_del_init clear_bit else if (test_bit) // true list_move_tail

And we get into the exact same broken ref count and invalid new_bgs state for transaction cleanup that BLOCK_GROUP_FLAG_NEW was designed to prevent.

The broken refcount aspect will result in a warning like:

[1272.943527] refcount_t: underflow; use-after-free. [1272.943967] WARNING: CPU: 1 PID: 61 at lib/refcount.c:28 refcount_warn…

Most recent entries from all

CVE-2025-22115 — btrfs: fix block group refcount race in btrfs_create_pending_block_groups()